Our Shit Smells: Comments on the Illusion & Delusion of Culture & Society We need to contemplate our current condition as contemporary individuals living in an increasingly public, commercialized, unintelligent culture. Complacently, we accept everything we are fed: technology, fashion, culture, news. We think our shit doesn’t smell, that we can commit no wrong, that everything is just peachy in the world we exist in. Blind to our excrement, we forget our basis as the basest of the animals. As much as I dislike what Clement Greenberg posited in his writings, there is one inconsequential idea in his argument that I find fascinating because it is steeped in the detritus of the “uncultured” that he tried so desperately to sweep under the rug: “Superior culture is one of the most artificial of all human creations” (548). The operative word is “creations.” It’s such a short statement that it can be easily overlooked, but perhaps has the most far reaching impact of anything his mind vomited onto a page. Out of all the “artificial” creations brought to life by human beings through 1939, Greenberg whispered that “superior culture” was the most fabricated. I would like to go further and say that up to, including, and after these early months of 2014, culture, that is everything that is deemed socially acceptable, proper, reproducible, profitable, or marketable, is nothing more a polished mound of shit that we consume, defecate and repurpose in the name of culture, consumerism, and distraction. It should be apparent that I’m aping Georges Bataille’s scatological obsession to aid my point of view, knowing full well that what I am presenting is only a singular point of view. We seem to forget that no matter our social standing, we are all scatophagous creatures to a greater or lesser degree. Greenberg proclaimed that “the masses must be provided with objects of admiration and wonder” (549). What of those that constitute the “superior” portion of society? Are they not also provided with “objects of admiration and wonder” in the form of high art and culture? Who provides them with their “superior” distractions? Those of us that constitute the masses that are forced to subsist within the confines of the illusion of society set up by those who enforce power over the majority. “Industrial wealth…is the result of thousands of years’ work on the part of the enslaved masses…” (Bataille, “The End” 61). Without the work of every existing and deceased individual to ever know this planet, the developments that are defined as both common and high culture would not be possible. The shit that we despise or enjoy has come from our own efforts as human beings to forget to some extent where we exist within the confines of society and to attempt to move above our status as animal organisms. We all enjoy the same types of distractions, it is just a matter of how much polishing we prefer to see before we begin to ingest them. We are distracting ourselves into an oblivious coma of commodities, forgetting that “nowhere, no doubt…is there anything going on that is noticeably different from the rest, from the past, from political traditions, from literary traditions” (Bataille, “Lugubrious Game” 29). It would seem that I aim to suggest disdain for, well, the way of life in general, but that is not what I want to do. In my opinion, it is better to have an understanding of one’s situation than to sit in the middle of the road in your soiled pants, screaming at those passing by. As Mark Taylor so eloquently put in his examination of Bataille, “the overthrow of the ruling master in the name of “reason” does not necessarily result in freedom…[as] reason can become oppressive and repressive” (121). Knowledge of the extent and limit of our own domestication is more valuable than ignorantly ingesting those polished distractions that we call culture, but we need to be aware that freedom may not lie with either circumstance. Of course, the illusion of personal freedom fluctuates and the value of anything is purely perceptual and entirely subjective, differing from individual to individual. There is only one thing that we can be sure of, something that Bataille addressed well: everything has a basis in the basest of human existence. Without the excrement that we invent, ingest, and defecate their is no foundation for society or culture, low or high. The shit we produce is simply fertilizer we use to make ourselves better. “Better” is arguable, of course. Maybe the more appropriate term to use is “civilized.” We are blissfully ignorant that everything that creates inequality and stupidity in our population is rooted in the illusion that our shit no longer smells. Polish it as we do, and as shiny as it gets, we forget to keep ourselves grounded and remind ourselves that it’s all shit, and it shouldn’t define us as a populace of thoughtless human animals.